Free Republic

American and western intelligence sources believe Iran has been increasing its shipments of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, and that the deliveries now include Global Positioning System (GPS) components to make previously unguided rockets into precision guided-missiles, increasing the threat to Israel, Fox News reported on Friday. One of the Iranian flights arrived in Lebanon three days ago, officials told the news channel. Iran’s Fars Air Qeshm flight number QFZ-9950 departed Tehran International Airport on Tuesday at 9:33 a.m. local time, and flew to an unknown destination, according to flight data obtained by Fox News. Later in the day, the Boeing...

During the Obama presidency, the U.S. administration was wary of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had come to power in Egypt after the country’s first-ever free elections. Despite his declared support for democracy and change in the Arab world in the wake of the Arab Spring, then-President Barack Obama did not take a strong position and reject the coup against President-elect Mohamed Morsi. The coup, as we know, led to the military’s return to power in the largest Arab country — along with tyranny, repression, corruption and mismanagement. That is the conclusion that David D. Kirkpatrick arrives at in his excellent...

Former Vice President Joe Biden says President Donald Trump may not “know what he’s doing” and coddles dictators. The potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate told CBS “This Morning” Thursday he’s concerned Trump “seems to have a love affair with autocrats” and “coddles” dictators, including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the Saudi ruling family. […] Biden said he hopes Democrats don’t pursue Trump’s impeachment if the party takes over the House, saying, “I don’t think there’s a basis for doing that right now.” …

The United States on Thursday downgraded the status of its main diplomatic mission to the Palestinians by placing it under the authority of the U.S. Embassy to Israel. The move, which was immediately denounced by the Palestinians and hailed by Israel, is the latest Trump administration decision to align with Israeli government views and a victory for U.S. Ambassador David Friedman. He had long sought to end the Jerusalem consulate’s independent status but had faced resistance from within the State Department. Friedman’s push picked up steam in May after the Trump administration moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem...

The humanitarian superpower Sweden has once again shown that it has no problem giving one vulnerable person preference over another when deciding whom to expel and who should be allowed to stay for humanitarian purposes. When Denis was only 5 years old, his mother was found dead in an apartment in Södertälje. As his Ukrainian father has renounced custody, he is now an orphan. Now the Swedish Migration Agency has decided that he will be expelled to Ukraine all by himself. There, he will probably end up in an orphanage since he has no family there who can take care...

<p>The attorney for U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison has filed an appeal seeking to prevent a Hennepin County District Court from enforcing a ruling issued last week ordering the divorce records of Ellison and his ex-wife Kim be unsealed.</p> <p>The petition for writ of prohibition was filed with the Minnesota Court of Appeals Monday. Ellison is the DFL candidate for state attorney general.</p>

15h25. L’auteur de la prise otage est « gravement blessé » des suites de son arrestation. Il est « en cours de réanimation » annonce la police

A 62-year-old Jewish man claims his attacker repeatedly shouted 'Allah' as he beat him in the middle of the road in Brooklyn, New York Sunday morning. Lipa Schwartz was on his way to synagogue when livery driver Farrukh Afzal, 37, battered him until another Hasidic man came to the rescue. 'All of a sudden 'boom!' I tried to protect myself, run away. I fell. He come again on me,' Schwartz told ABC7 Eyewitness News.

An Israeli government study shared with Washington argues that Palestinian refugees number in the thousands, not the millions designated by a U.N. aid agency whose funding has been slashed by the Trump administration, an Israeli official said on Friday. The fate of Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and their descendants has long clouded U.S.-sponsored peace efforts. Frustration over the issue is among factors fuelling often violent weekly protests at the Gaza border over the last half year, during which around 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. Palestinians demand a refugee right of return to...

U.S. Democratic Senate hopeful Kyrsten Sinema promoted events at Arizona State University featuring a lawyer convicted for aiding an Islamist terror organization and its leader. Sinema, a co-founder of the activist group Local to Global Justice, invited people in a now-closed Yahoo group to attend two events with Lynn Stewart, both in 2003. At the time of the invite, Stewart had been charged with helping her former client Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Egyptian spiritual leader of a terror group, to pass on secret messages to his followers to commit terror attacks. In the first event’s invite, Sinema said the...

A 39-year-old man from Aalborg must pay fines totaling 4,000 kroner for posting hate speech on his Facebook page in October 2017. The man was found to have written “macabre and threatening words against Muslims”, local media Nordjyske reports. […] He said that the words were intended as part of a poem and should be considered a cultural input. But Aalborg District Court found that the 39-year-old made threats of violence against Muslims, judging him guilty of breaching article 266b in Denmark’s criminal law code, also known as the “racism clause”. …

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday denounced the “awful abuses” of Muslim Uygurs detained in Chinese reeducation camps. “Hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of Uygurs are held against their will in so-called re-education camps where they’re forced to endure severe political indoctrination and other awful abuses,” Pompeo said in a speech in Washington on the state of religious freedom around the world. He also expressed concern about the fate of Christians in China, who he said had been targeted in a government crackdown. The government, he said, has been “closing churches, burning Bibles and ordering followers to...

The United States on Monday asked judges at the International Court of Justice to throw out a claim by Iran to recover $1.75 billion (€1.5 billion) in national bank assets seized by U.S. courts. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the assets must be turned over to American families of victims of the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, among others. The hearings at the tribunal were separate from Iran’s claim relating to current U.S. sanctions against Tehran. Iran’s claim in both cases is based on a 1955 Amity Treaty, which was signed 24...

ST. LOUIS — We often see studies that tell us not only is light or moderate drinking not harmful to our health, in some cases, it’s actually good for us. But new research out of Washington University’s School of Medicine suggests that daily glass of wine may not be such a good idea after all. Instead, it actually raises your risk of dying sooner. According to the study of more than 400,000 American adults, light drinkers — regardless of age — are 20 percent more likely to suffer a premature death. “It used to seem like having one or two...

The German economy is booming. Unemployment is at a near-record low. In Europe and around the world, the country is seen as a beacon of wealth and efficiency. So why are these prosperous young Germans so doggedly pessimistic about their future? Peter Matuschek, chief political analyst at the German polling institute Forsa, says that while Germans tend to be content with their own lives, they feel less at ease with the direction the country is taking. And while the assumption may be that this is a phenomenon among older Germans, it’s also very much affecting the younger generation. Mirroring the...

BISMARCK — A Minnesota woman pleaded guilty to voting twice during the 2016 election in a Cass County (N.D.) court Tuesday, Sept. 25, marking a rare prosecution of such an offense in North Dakota. Hannan Yassin Aboubaker of Shakopee, Minn., entered an Alford plea on a Class A misdemeanor "election offense," meaning she didn't admit wrongdoing but acknowledged she may have been found guilty based on the evidence. Her sentence was deferred and she was placed on unsupervised probation for six months, two months after which the case would be dismissed and the file would be sealed.

The U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees expressed concern on Friday over moves by the mayor of Jerusalem to close down its operations in the city. Mayor Nir Barkat said on Thursday he had developed a plan to end the Jerusalem operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which aids Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and to millions of their descendants, and to replace them with Israeli services. UNRWA has faced a financial crisis since the United States in August announced it was cutting aid to the body, calling it an “irredeemably flawed...

""Pompeo Terminates Iran Treaty After UN Court Hands Tehran A Victory In Sanctions Lawsuit Against Washington"" Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Wednesday the U.S. will terminate a 63-year-old treaty with Iran, hours after a top United Nations court ruled in favor of Tehran in a lawsuit challenging U.S. sanctions. Pompeo said the abrogation of the 1955 Treaty of Amity was “39 years overdue,” referring to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran that resulted in the overthrow of the U.S.-friendly shah. Until Pompeo’s announcement, the Treaty of Amity had remained in force even though Washington and Tehran have not had...

The U.N. nuclear watchdog has said its independence is paramount and it does not take intelligence presented to it at face value, in an apparent response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s description of a “secret atomic warehouse” in Iran. Netanyahu — who opposes the nuclear deal between Iran and major powers that the International Atomic Energy Agency is policing — made the statement in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week. He urged the IAEA to visit the site in Tehran. A U.S. State Department official later seconded that call. “The agency sends inspectors to sites...

Spain’s foreign minister revealed that US President Donald Trump suggested building a wall along the Sahara desert to stem the arrival of migrants, as he plans to do on the Mexican border. “Closing ports is not a solution, and neither is building a wall along the Sahara like President Trump suggested to me recently,” Josep Borrell told a lunchtime gathering this week, according to a video released by Spanish media. “Just build a wall that borders the Sahara,” he quoted Trump as telling him. “But do you know how big the Sahara is?” the minister responded. He did not give...